Giving Laura Mulvey Her Due

Jezebel linked to Stanley Fish's NYT Opinion piece about Kim Novak asking "Does Kim Novak get ignored by film critics because she was "the object of voyeuristic male gaze" in the '50s?" I clicked through thinking that Fish's piece was going to be some kind of reclaiming of Novak, lauding her as an actress in her own right and not just a pretty face steered around by powerful directors. (And in answer to Jezebel's question: Kim Novak is hardly ignored by film theory and criticism and when she is discussed, its usually only in the context of the male gaze. Please, Ladies.)

Fish's Op Ed "Giving Kim Novak Her Due" is a pretty tribute to a beautiful actress, a star who put up with more than her fair share of bullying through her career at the hands of Hitchcock, Preminger, Wilder, some of Hollywood's most famous auteurs. I agree that in the company of cinematic authors of that caliber, history never quite includes Novak as a driving force in the landmark films in which she stars. Nevertheless, upon finishing Fish's article I am left with but one screaming, rage-filled thought: "Holy crap! Did I just read an article about Kim Novak and the male gaze written in two-thousand-and-freaking-eight with not one single mention of Laura Mulvey?????" I mean, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema is such a primary text in Film Theory (not just Feminist Film Theory), I resist even summarizing it in a blog. However, I know that one person's seminal text is another's petty diversion, as academic fields and interests vary. (This exemption does not apply to the NYT, however.) In a nutshell, Mulvey uses psychoanalytic theory (Freud, Lacan) to equate the camera's view with the desirous male gaze, consequently the cinematic spectator's gaze becomes aligned with the male gaze. I'm a little to riled up right now to really discuss it in full, maybe later when I've taken the rage down a few notches I'll have a more thoughtful analysis of Mulvey v. Fish. Nevertheless, Fish's summation "[Novak] was something that has gone out of fashion and even become suspect in an era of feminist strictures: she was the object of a voyeuristic male gaze..." both flagrantly talks around Mulvey and blames her (without naming names) for the destruction of Novak's celebrity and the type of woman she portrayed on the screen. But wasn't that entirely the point? I'm all for nostalgia but why should a woman movie goer with her wits about her be complacent in worshiping an actress as a "glittering something beheld from afar." Mulvey set out to change that for women, and in turn put spectatorship into question for all audience members who watch through the eyes of a camera lens who aren't heterosexual white and male.

image above from Masters of Media. More hilarious smartypants jokes there.

What's In the Hearts of Men

Last week I had the opportunity to meet one of my idols. An opportunity I totally balked at, of course, because I couldn’t come up with anything to say to him. Anything other than to tell him that a recent episode of Metalocalypse referenced Fitzcarraldo, and Cary Jones fed that to me. Anything that came straight from my heart, from what I really felt, would sound too gushing to be sincere. ‘Werner Herzog you are the most brilliant filmmaker, the most daring creative force walking this planet. Everything you say about cinema is exactly what I feel.’ He even left Jonathan Demme a little star struck in the clip I’ve linked to. The only fitting tribute to Werner Herzog and his grand cinematic vision was a totally unintentional one. While we assembled to hear a man who has moved mountains for movies (and boats across them) a man who has grappled with humanity’s alienation from the earth, God, and his own often alien society, another man, (less poetically the second of the day) scaled the exterior of the 52 story Times Building where we waited in the basement auditorium. I would climb a building for Werner Herzog, but I chose three glasses of free wine instead.

As usual everything Herzog said was the perfect combination of bananas, brilliance and poetry. He told Demme “I know what’s in the hearts of men.” Then he told a story about recording interviews for Wild Blue Yonder wherein he entered a room full of astronauts who seemed a bit standoffish. He looked around and then told them about growing up in the mountains of Bavaria and how he became very adept at milking cows. Every since then he could always pick out a man who could milk a cow by looking at his face. He pointed at one man and declared ‘you, sir, know how to milk a cow!’ which was true. He told Demme that to be a filmmaker you must know what is in the hearts of men, and know what frightens them.

Of most interest to me were his thoughts on what is becoming a running theme of this blog. Herzog declared “If you don’t understand how to collaborate you’ll never understand the real essence of moviemaking.” Werner Herzog is a poet (and I don’t bestow that lightly or without a bit of irony, however it cannot be denied that the man has a way with language and a sense of drama like none other) of singular vision, and he makes more than liberal use of the poetic license that comes along with the title. Nevertheless, no matter how much truth is stretched, no matter how much embellishment is added or midgets enlisted to portray the human struggle, Herzog is a man who has worked intimately with some great and famously difficult artists in their own right, Klaus Kinski being the most famously infamous. During his talk with Demme, Herzog told of his collaboration with musician Florian Fricke (until he discovered New Age music later in life, and Herzog let him go his own way, b/c that kind of music is not to Dear Werner’s liking) and his years working with Peter Zeitlinger, a cinematographer on nearly 10 (or possibly 17—Herzog said that number but I can’t corroborate that) films. Filmmaking is an art that involves the most amount of industry and consequently the most cooperation between artists of varying fields. Where collaboration can dilute an artistic vision, where it can corrupt what makes something special about an idiosyncratic visual artist or author, as Herzog states, to truly be a filmmaker you must be someone who will allow collaboration to broaden a vision. Great directors or writers or editors to blossom under the pressures of cooperation by focus most on their strongest skills, relying on what makes their vision singular and what that brings to an artistic endeavor as massive as a move. Despite, or perhaps because of his passion for music, when working with a great musician Herzog told Demme that he sits in the same room as someone like Fricke, but just to inhabit the space, to feel the creativity, but was adamant that ‘his world is his world’ and Herzog stays, in the same room, but in a world of his own. Rather than controlling another’s vision, Herzog finds inspiration in chance and the things that ‘fall into his lap.’

Ostensibly the night was in celebration of the launch of The Museum of the Moving Image’s new web resource, the Moving Image Source. When Demme posed a question about YouTube (‘too small and quick’ for Herzog’s liking) and upped his hipster cred by name-dropping Dan Deacon, Herzog paid delightful tribute to my former employer. Herzog declared that with the launch of the Moving Image Source, “all of a sudden the web gains significant depth... the web was so shallow and uniformed now you can use it to go to the deep bottoms of the unknown in cinema.”

video from The Film Panel Notetaker

Thrown to the Owls

Watching The Daily Show last night it hit me who Clinton campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe reminds me of: Leland Palmer, from Twin Peaks. Now, I’m not comfortable making any wild thematic comparisons between a fictional character created by David Lynch and real life person with a career in politics, mostly because I’m a Clinton supporter. Moreover, because finding similarities between Palmer (a man who is simultaneously wild with grief over the death of his daughter and is embodied with a murderous incarnation of evil in its truest form), and McAuliffe (a man who has been placed as the face of a campaign that --even I, a Clinton girl will admit-- is all but lost and is representing that campaign with a kind of delusional zeal and political posturing that played a part in bringing our girl down) doesn’t take that much real effort. However, I’m going to throw comfort aside in this instance. As we move into the general election, I know my candidate won’t be at the top of the Democratic ticket, but I find solace in that the death of the campaign for The First Woman President was perhaps heralded by the same sinister, invisible forces at work in everyday American society that murdered Laura Palmer. McAuliffe’s performance on The Daily Show-- and a performance of epic proportions it was-- echoed the maniacal delusion of possessed Leland Palmer. McAuliffe’s stubborn refusal to reckon with the realities of the all but lost Clinton campaign, and insistence on repeating well-vetted political rhetoric that has become an ineffective trope from most of Clinton’s aides (aside from those who choose to speak more from the hip and are thrown to the owls, just to keep my metaphors within the theme) left me feeling like he was moments away from bursting into Mairzy Doats within sight of Jon Stewart.